CIA's multibillion dollar spy program ends up being 'a colossal flop'

United States government officials with intimate knowledge of a little-known Central Intelligence Agency spy program now say the CIA’s post-9/11 efforts to send undercover agents around the globe was “a colossal flop.”

That’s according at least to one of the former senior CIA
officials who spoke with
Los Angeles Times journalist Ken Dilanian for an article
published on Sunday about the agency’s “non-official cover,” or
“NOC” roles. Those are instances in which CIA agents were sent
abroad to pose as business executives in order to collect
intelligence for their bosses back at headquarters near
Washington, DC, such as the case of former spy Valerie Plame,
whose first-hand account of her experience was turned into the
best-selling book, then movie, Fair Game.

Dilanian reported that the CIA spent at least $3 billion on the
Global Deployment Initiative — which administered NOC roles — in
the years after the September 11 terrorist attack, while the
number of specially trained spies grew from the dozens into the
hundreds. As they were routinely sent time and time again
overseas to collect intelligence, however, their efforts rarely
if at all proved to be productive, sources told the Times.

According to this week’s report, language barriers and large
liabilities kept many undercover agents from properly
infiltrating target demographics, such as Al Qaeda and other
extremist groups, and instead the CIA spent billions trying
unsuccessfully to milk foreign targets for valuable information.

“[T]oo few spoke Urdu, Pashto, Dari or other necessary
languages, or could disappear in local cultures,” former CIA
officers told the Times.

Other times, sources said, undercover agents were easily
identified. Although the operatives would often be sent overseas
with fake identities and backstories, they were rarely able to
rope in targets, who the CIA had hoped would be tricked into
submitting secret information to the undercovers.

Fake companies and operatives in Iran, for example, did little to
fool those involved in the nation’s nuclear and missile
procurement networks, Dilanian reported. Those spies were
ultimately sent back to CIA headquarters following unsuccessful
missions.

Others, a former chief of the CIA’s Europe division said, weren’t
even deployed to the right arena. Some, Joseph Wippl told the
Times, were posted “a zillion miles from where their targets
were located.”

The Global Deployment Initiative’s billion-dollar budget is now
being cut, the Times reports, but not after what Dilanian claims
to be a failure in which “inexperience, bureaucratic hurdles,
lack of language skills and other problems” plagued a
program whose successes could be counted on one hand.

The “colossal flop” sentiment supplied by one former
official, Dilanian wrote, was echoed by around one dozens others
who offered to provide the paper with details on the NOC roles,
albeit anonymous.

One former agent — who did provide the paper with permission to
use his name — said that he was only aware of three successful
NOCs during his 20-plus years within the CIA.

"They were absolute nightmares for the administrative
bureaucracy of the agency," the CIA vet, John Maguire, told
the Times.